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How many words do we actually need? | ||
Tags: Number of words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6107 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 57 of 115 30 January 2013 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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300-500 words: Good enough to develop grammatical constructs [s.allard's point?] You could explore all tenses, declensions and a large amount of syntax with just this amount. You could transfer these constructs into speech and speak beautifully and accurately with your tiny vocabulary, but it would be pretty boring though.
300-500 just isn't enough to listen very well, read very extensively or converse reasonably deeply. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 58 of 115 30 January 2013 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Since the discussion has moved to vocabulary size and the CEFR levels, here is a paper that looks, inter alia, at the vocabulary size in French needed for various levels. CEFR and vocabulary It is suggested that for the C2 levels in French and English 3300 and 4500 words are needed respectively.
The fundamental question that @emk has raised is: how much vocabulary for what? While it is true that @Iversen can certainly talk about other thinks besides subjects here at HTLAL, the fact remains that in the confines of HTLAL, his active vocabulary is around 2500. Let's say we recorded every word spoken by a person for six months, how many different words would that individual use? Some of us work in very word-heavy professions, i.e. academia, journalism, science, teaching, politics, etc. with high word count. But I firmly believe that all the observations point to the fact that active or productive vocabulary size is quite small because we only use a small subset of all the words available. To respond specifically to the issues of vocabulary size for testing purposes, the basic wisdom is that you need a larger vocabulary as the test level goes up because of the wide range of potential subjects. This is undoubtedly true, but how wide a vocabulary do you really need? At the C2 where you could be asked to talk or write about nearly anything, do you need a huge active vocabulary? Well you certainly need more than the A1 level, but I contend that it's not that huge, to wit around 3300 for French. How could you talk about anything with only 3300 words? The answer lies an understanding how the CEFR tests work and what they attempt to measure. They are not vocabulary tests and they do not attempt to measure your knowledge of the subject. They are designed to assess how you can deal with the subjects in terms of linguistic fluency and precision. In other words, it's how you use the linguistic resources that you have that impresses the jury. 3300 words in French is a hell of a lot of words. The real issue is how you use them. And this has always been my point, ad nauseam I admit. To convey nuances you can use more words and/or you can better use the words you have. So if you get a question on the future impact of global warming, how much technical vocabulary do you have to know? Well, it would be nice to know how to say things like greenhouse gases, desertification, carbon sequestration, fossils fuels, rising sea levels, etc. But out of these 3300 words you do know, you must be able to deal with the subject in a fluent and grammatical way and work around the things for which you do not have the precise words. What you don't want to do is start stuttering, searching for words and making major grammar mistakes. If you can speak in an idiomatic fashion and display your overall command of the language, you will carry the day. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 59 of 115 30 January 2013 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
Just let me point out that, although this is not the subject of the thread, this idea of 300-500 words is not about reading extensively or conversing deeply. It is a threshold level for speaking fluently. And it's certainly not about exploring all the tenses and declensions, etc. Quite the contrary, it's about choosing only what is relevant and commonly used. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 60 of 115 30 January 2013 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have just listened to a debate on the radio on the role of the internet in pop culture. I'll admit that this is not rocket science, no pun intended, but I was struck by the fact that there was no really exotic vocabulary and that people were using ordinary words to convey sophisticated meanings. These were not babbling teenagers; they were journalists and writers using ordinary words. Edited by s_allard on 30 January 2013 at 4:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5347 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 61 of 115 30 January 2013 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
The real issue I believe is what you need them for, and this is what will determine whether they're an adequate amount or not. I reckon my German at at least C1. I can understand a news broadcast or a soap opera episode with ease. But in order to examine this question I pulled from my shelves my copies of Der Zauberberg and Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft. I could hardly make sense of them. Not only did I encounter unknown vocabulary, the syntax is more complex and challenging than what I'm used to. Of course, if I sat down and went over each paragraph slowly and with recourse to a dictionary I would be able to read either. But I'm still a long way from being capable of approaching them as I would their English or Spanish translation. With possession of only a limited amount of a language you can make yourself understood on simple tasks and topics, no question, but I don't think it can substitute for higher forms of expression. These wouldn't have developed if there weren't a need for them. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5347 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 62 of 115 30 January 2013 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not to stray too much from the topic at hand, but I would be skeptical of the part in bold. I don't think the internet has given rise or voice to anything "meaningful". Here is a view I agree with on the main. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 63 of 115 30 January 2013 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
That paper doesn't include any methodology sections, so I have no idea how they calculated those numbers. But I remember seeing that "4,500 words = C2" claim before, and I actually dug down into the methodology section of the relevant study. The actual "counting" procedure consisted of taking the 5,000 most common words, and diving them into 5 tranches of 1,000 words each. Students were then asked to define a random sampling of words from each tranche. The study concluded that C2 students could give a definition for 4,500 of the 5,000 most common words. But the study never looked at words 5,001–10,000, 10,001–15,000, and so on, and many of these less frequent words were presumably also known by the C2 students. In fact, even a widely-read native speaker could score no higher than 5,000 using this methodology, because that's all the words they test. But somehow these numbers were picked up and widely disseminated by other SLA researchers, which just goes to show that a lot of bad data gets blown out of proportion in SLA research. Furthermore, a lot of claims were based on O-levels and A-levels, which other studies have shown to be substantially easier than the corresponding national exams. (I.e., if the UK thinks you speak B1 French, that doesn't necessarily mean that the French will agree.) Shortly before sitting down to take the DELF B2 exam, I actually spent several hours flipping through the Routledge Frequency Dictionary of French. If I picked a random page between word 4,000 and word 5,000, I could define maybe 75% of the words. And I knew tons of words which weren't in the book, plus all the thousands of cognates that an English speaker gets for free. When I actually sat down to take the exam, I got a pretty respectable score. But I definitely missed some reading comprehension questions because of vocabulary holes, and I needed to use some ridiculous workarounds for the oral presentation, because I was missing some pretty important words related to urban transportation. (E.g., péages "tolls", which isn't in the top 5,000. At least I knew centre-ville "downtown, center city", even if I pronounced it wrong. Hey, I'm from the countryside.) So, grammar's great, and you can do an awful lot of good stuff if you master phrasal verbs in English, or compounds like s'en aller, en vouloir and se la péter in French. But I won't trust any SLA research on vocabulary size unless I can read the methodology section of their papers. And based on my experiences with the Routledge Frequency Dictionary of French and the DELF B2, I definitely wouldn't try to sit the DALF C2 with a 4,500 word passive vocabulary. I'd strongly prefer than 10,000- to 15,000-word passive vocabulary that most people supposedly develop after a year or two of immersion. EDIT: Fix spelling of péages. Edited by emk on 30 January 2013 at 7:31pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 64 of 115 30 January 2013 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is a good example of the misunderstanding. Nobody is saying that a limited vocabulary is a substitute for a larger one. If you have a limited active and passive vocabulary and attempt to read a sophisticated work of fiction or non-fiction, or even a newspaper from cover to cover, you will notice that there are many words or expressions that you don't know. This is normal. Does this mean that you cannot discuss certain topics with a certain degree of sophistication within a limited vocabulary? I disagree. There are technical subjects that require a technical vocabulary. We can agree on that. But I believe that one can speak about many subjects with some accuracy up to a certain level of understanding without having to resort to a highly technical vocabulary. When a doctor is speaking to another doctor, she will use their common jargon. When that same doctor is talking to me, she uses a different vocabulary. I can understand and discuss certain things using the language I know. Can we talk about the subject in a sophisticated way? To a certain level but not beyond because I am not a doctor. With reference to a previous post, a vocabulary of 3000 - 4000 words in English or French is in my opinion huge. (Remember I said that 300 - 500) is a threshold). The real question is how to use them well. You may not be able to pick any book off the shelf and read it without looking up some words but you can talk intelligently about any topic under the sun. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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